


Meet the Logans?

by Skippee



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, Lyatt angst, jessica is alive, post-hollywoodland
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-06
Updated: 2018-04-06
Packaged: 2019-04-19 09:59:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14234823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skippee/pseuds/Skippee
Summary: “You know this is madness, right?”Of course it’s madness. You’re dead.





	Meet the Logans?

“You know this is madness, right?”

_Of course it’s madness. You’re dead._

“Turn left here.”

She raised an eyebrow but slowed down to make the turn.  He ran his finger along the crack in the handle over the door and felt the crack between them widen a little farther.

 

The bar had felt like silence when she turned around, but it was nothing compared to hour-plus drive they’d already had in monosyllables at best.  At there he’d least then he had a reason to gawp. He couldn’t believe he was seeing her. She couldn’t believe he had the nerve to walk into her bar after all this time and made sure he knew it.  She’d frog-marched him outside for privacy when her actual customers got a little too interested at “missing and presumed dead”.

“What is _wrong_ with you, Wyatt? It’s been almost two months and you show up here out of the blue looking like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I’m just… really happy to see you.” He took her hand, noticing how the ring flashed in the light, just like it used to.

She snatched it back. “You haven't been happy to see me after an op in years. You're always retracing everything in your head and hyper-analyzing whatever’s going on around you because you _have to_ there, and I can't do a damned thing to help because it's _classified._ ”

It stung.  He’d forgotten those nights. The first nights, when the apartment was too clean, too quiet. She wouldn’t know he was coming until an hour or so before he showed up on their doorstep, and would proceed to spend the next 58 minutes and 26 seconds making sure everything was perfect. Perfection was short-lived. She thought he was under-appreciative, and “fine” was only an acceptable response so many times. He wished he could stop seeing calculations and exit strategies from his kitchen.

Feeling unloved and overwhelmed or exhausted and isolated, down they spiraled until her face turned to stone and the ice crept up his veins and he thought about sinking. He'd find himself at one dingy bar or another trying to see some sense of the life he was supposed to be living in the bottom of a glass, but it was never there either. She’d find him on the couch the next morning and grumble about idiot men, but at least he was her idiot, and he was _home_.  

He always promised he would get it right eventually.  She almost believed him. Two years and 8 months felt like an eternity at the time, but when the hourglass was up, it was never  enough.

 

\----

 

Rufus found Jiya in the kitchen, with the coffee maker scattered in 15 pieces around her. “I'm going to have a decent cup of coffee here if it's the last thing I do,” she said through gritted teeth and three screws held in the corner of her mouth. “Oh, you're back! How was the trip?”  Or, at least he thought that's what she asked.

“Enlightening.” He passed her the heating coil. “In… so many ways.”

“Great?”  Somewhat more intelligible, with only one screw left now.

“Met Hedy Lamar, convinced a studio head I was Langston Hughes, crashed a party we were _definitely_ not invited to… oh, and I walked in on Wyatt and Lucy.”

She frowned and tightened the last of the screws into place. “What do you mean, ‘walked in on them’?”

“You know, in a room, in a bed, _not_ in clothes, like we’ve been predicting for, I don't know, the last six months?”

“I didn't know we were into that sort of thing.” She raised an eyebrow. “Besides, even if I wouldn't put it past Wyatt, I'd never expect Lucy to go along with it.”

“Wait, what?”

Something had gone wrong. Very wrong. It was the dead security guard or the equally dead Rittenhouse agent or the now very wealthy Hedy Lamar or any other unknowable combination of circumstances they might have touched. In any case, it had resulted in one very _not_ dead Jessica Logan.   “Oh this is bad. This is very bad.” Rufus pressed the heels of his hands over his eyes and thought it might keep his brain from exploding. “She's supposed to be gone. Long gone. Like, six-feet-under gone. Like, ‘Dude, it's been six years, you're allowed to move on’ gone.”

“Oh shit.”

He deserved to know, they decided.  Who’s to say they wouldn’t somehow change it back on the next jump?  It could be now or never. With Jiya’s help, he had a name and address and fate, or something like it, in his hands.  

 

“ _There’s someone you need to see. Thought you should know._

_513 W. Sunset, Santa Maria”_

 

_send_

 

The alarms were a surprise (maybe Christopher really was prepared for any of Wyatt's antics), but the result was not.  Lucy shouted his name. Garcia Flynn turned the page of his newspaper without looking at any of them.  Rufus felt sick.

He must have missed the others drifting off while staring down the steel door.  When he turned around again, only Jiya remained. He gave a shaky smile and held out a hand.  “It’s you and me still, right?”

She took it.  “Absolutely.”

 

\----

 

The old impala kicked up a cloud of dust as she turned onto the gravel road.  Wyatt gripped the handle tighter and tried not to think of Lucy. The way she lit up in the pre-jump briefing.  The way she laughed with Jiya over cups of dirt-flavored coffee at any time of the day or night. The way she touched his face and he _knew_.

“And you’re sure this isn’t a kidnapping?  Pretty messed up, by the way, making your captive drive you to the hideout.”  She tried to smile, let him know it was only in jest.

“You said you needed proof.  I know it’s crazy, Jess.”

“Don’t call me that.”  The smile was gone, and the stone facade of control was back.  

 

The bar alley conversation led back to the cheap motel room he’d rented to wash off 1941 (“And _her_ ,” said guilt, but he wasn't sure he really wanted Lucy off his skin.).  Jessica sat, tensed, on the edge of the bed. How could she look so much like a stranger?  His mind flashed to the dozens of times, maybe hundreds for her now, she'd asked for details he'd been unwilling or unable to give.  _You would have told Lucy,_ said guilt, and that cemented his decision.  Jessica was his wife, after all.  The truth was coming out this time, he owed her that much, but then she dropped a bigger bomb.  The ice inside him was back, and it hadn't bother to creep this time. How badly could those six years have gone?  Were they already going down that path on that horrible night he'd lost her?

“Jess, just let me explain,” he started, once he remembered how to speak.

“Explain what? Why you ‘kind of’ remember the last two months? Are you drinking again? Drugs? You got hit on the head by the latest baddie you're chasing God knows where and forgot to come home? Please, do tell. I'm sure it'll be another riveting tale. And stop calling me that.”

He tried.  He started with the story of Flynn, “the terrorist”, stealing tech from Mason industries.  The feds needed a specialist, so they called up Delta Force, who were all too happy to be rid of him for a spell.  The real process was probably a bit more complicated, but he figured that was the gist of it.

She actually looked like she believed him, right until he got to the part about the “tech” being a time machine.  She rolled her eyes, but he pressed on. It was a standard debrief, that's all. Just the facts. The missions, “saving” history, Rittenhouse, and even the explosion rolled off his tongue, until suddenly he was miles away in an office that was too small and a uniform too warm explaining to the Lieutenant Colonel why none of his brothers were coming home.

When he opened his eyes again, he was on his knees on the floor of a dingy motel room.  Jessica leaned on the wall. “Looks like I was right,” she drawled. “ _Riveting._ ”

“Jess, you- Sorry.  You don't understand. We _did_ change history, by accident. When I left on the first trip, you’d been dead for six years. I haven't seen you for _six years_.”

Whether or not she believed him, she was certainly caught off guard.  He rose to his feet. “I didn't get to be the kind of man I wanted to be for you. So I'm trying to make it up to you now. I'm telling the truth.”

Silence. Then, “I want to see it.”

It was a horrible idea, really, but here they were, kicking up dust on an unmarked road to a bunker that few knew existed.  He pointed out the final turn and suddenly the hours in the car had been far too short. _Lucy,_ said guilt, but he pushed it away.  He wasn't sure any specifics on the team had come up in the story, now that he thought about it.  It was was too late to worry about it now, standing on the other side of the steel door that had caged him for weeks.  It was fate, if a person believed in that sort of thing, or maybe just cruel irony that he'd been willing to raise heaven and hell to save two different women, and he was on the verge of losing both of them by some freak twist in history.  

He put his hand on the door and looked to Jessica, who was staring pointedly ahead.   _For better or for worse,_ said guilt, in an unexpected change of allegiance.  _Just a regular SNAFU_ , he thought back grimly, and not for the first time wished his troop was here to laugh about it.  

He took a breath. It was time to face the music.  “Ready?”

“Ready.”


End file.
